Monday, October 22, 2012

Tora packages with Oracle support for Mageia 2

In Mageia we include a really good database administration client called TOra, you can learn more about it on its website, but for those of you that work with databases, to give you an idea of its features (PL/SQL debugger, SQL worksheet with syntax highlighting, DB browser and DBA tools), I can tell you that it's very similar to the commercial client, TOAD. It's developed with the Qt framework, here's an screenshot so you can have an idea of how it looks:

The version we include of TOra in Mageia has Oracle database support disabled because we can't include the Oracle instant client packages due to licensing issues, so we have to do it in the same way I did it before at Mandriva: have on Mageia a package named tora with support enabled for MySQL and PostgreSQL only, and another one at TOra's download page called tora-oracle, which has additionally Oracle databases support enabled.

I had forgotten to compile and upload these Oracle enabled packages to TOra's SF download page until today. Now you can find here these packages, but remember that Oracle instant client must be installed before running this version of TOra. If you don't need Oracle support then install the packages that come with the distro. Maybe we can add a get-tora-oracle similar to the get-skype package to download tora-oracle from TOra's download page, but the Oracle instant client still has to be manually downloaded and installed by the user.

You can download Oracle instant client packages from here. Both oracle-instantclient11.2-basic and oracle-instantclient11.2-basiclite rpm packages work, but if you want to rebuild tora-oracle src package then you need to have oracle-instantclient11.2-devel too with the basic package.